So, largemouth bass are native only to North America, and pretty much only the southeast until they started getting stocked all over the nation. Now Japan shares the all-tackle record for largemouth bass. Somehow I missed this story last year, the fish was caught in September of 2009.

I used to be a big largemouth bass fisherman. As such I bought a lot of magazines and read some books on the subject. So I’ve known for some time that the world record for largemouth bass has for 77 years been the 22 pound, 4 ounce largemouth bass caught in a relatively small lake in Georgia during the midst of the Great Depression by a guy named George Perry, a small town farmer who was 20 years old at the time. There’s a bit of a legend about that fish in fact, since it was caught long before such things garnered major media attention and required lawyers to certify the weight of the fish. Mr. Perry weighed and measured the fish in the presence of a Notary Public on the certified scales of a Post Office in order to qualify for a then promotional Field & Stream contest and won a new fishing rod, a shotgun and some tackle (maybe $75 worth of stuff back then, probably around $500 today). Then after measuring and weighing it, he promptly took it home and the Perry family had bass filets for dinner. By the time a Field & Stream editor arrived to meet and talk to Mr. Perry, there was nothing left of the bass but some bones. Nevertheless, based on the Notary public, eye witnesses and the skeleton itself, the fish was duly certified as the world record at 22 pounds and 4 ounces.

Well, things are different today, and the fellow who cought the bass in Japan which has equaled Mr. Perry’s record is now a worldwide celebrity and has made a fortune in promotional fees and endorsements.

Almost makes you feel bad for Mr. Perry, who died in a small plane crash at the age of 61 or so…

Andy, actually my experience with largemouths has been that they mostly peak as “fighters” around 4 – 8 pounds. When they get bigger they don’t tend to jump as much and fighting one can resemble hauling in a log. George Perry described his fight with his record-breaking bass as “At first I thought the fish had wrapped my line around a log” or something like that. I’ve caught a few in the 10 pound range, and my experience has been similar.

They taste best in the 4 – 8 pound range too, maybe even in the 3 – 6 pound range. Although largemouth bass was never my favorite eating fish, I preferred catfish and crappie (white perch or sac-a-lait) for eating.

The best fight I ever had in a Louisiana lake was one I never saw the fish. I was fishing with an ultra-light rig with six pound test and got bored with the crappie fishing so I put a big crankbait on and started tossing it out on the edge of Gregg Lake in the middle of Lake Bisteneau. I hooked something that took off like a freight train, bending my rod so that I had the reel by my right ear, pointing backwards, and the front of the rod was below my right elbow pointing forward. The rod made a “Q” shape. It took out almost all my line, and I reeled it back in, then it took off again, and I reeled it in again, and then finally just when I thought I was getting it close enough to net, the lure popped out of the water with the steel treble hooks smashed flat. I don’t think it was ever even hooked, it was just chewing in the lure.

My brother swore he saw it and said it was a striped bass as big as his leg. He had a pretty big leg. The record striped bass in Bisteneau was then about 30 pounds, so he might have been right. But I’ll never know.

Heh, I’ve never seen a boat capsized by a striper. Toledo Bend stripers have been filmed by scuba divers in the 50 pound range I hear, but those same scuba divers climbed back into the boat shaking after encountering the 300 pound catfishes at the dam…

I’ve caught some pretty big gar which give a real good fight, but pound for pound I’d have to say the best fight I ever had was a chain pickerel I caught on Bistineau that weighed about four pounds (which actually was close to the record had I kept it). That thing fought like a beast! It had so much fight that even after I got it close to the boat, I had to play out some more line to wear it out a bit more before I was even willing to reach out and try to get the lure out of it’s huge mouth lined with needle-sharp teeth.

Rainbows are a lot of fun to catch, we used to call them “polaris” fish because they’d launch out of the water like a polaris missile. Brown trout tend to dig down and aren’t as much fun, but they can jump too. Brook trout are more like bass in how they fight, they jump but not straight up like a rainbow. I’ve had rainbows jump two to three feet out of the water trying to throw the hook.

I’ve only caught a few smallmouth, but the ones I did catch lived up to their billing as “pound for pound, the fightingest fish that swims.”

Cosmic, I have only fished for trout twice in my life. And both times it was for “dinner.” Long story, but my older brother and me found ourselves stranded in Colorado near the Gunnison River before the days of cell phones, debit cards, and had ALL OUR CASH taken by a female Judge in Amarillo, TX on the way up there…long story.

That trout tasted awfully good…along with a gallon of A & W Root Beer as we fried it up in the electric skillet we brought along in the old Grand Safari Station Wagon where we slept at night.

Long story…

My friend, I have caught too many gar to appreciate them. When I was a kid, I would keep them because Daddy made me…we would give them to the black folks that fished off the bridge on our way back home. They were always grateful.

As I got older, I just busted the gar in the snout with a boat paddle when I started to land one…too much trouble…I had had my hands gnashed too many times by the teeth of those worthless things.

I’m still kinda stumped about a “chain pickerel.” I’m not the most experienced fishermen in NW Louisiana (even though I am probably the luckiest), so I’m wondering if there is another name for it that I might recognize.

If it’s as big as four pounds, I’m thinking I might know it as a Buffalo fish, or a GasperGoo.

The “chain pickerel” is the only member of the pike family that can live in the south. That family includes the Northern Pike and the Muskellunge, two of the most fearsome fish in the placid waters of north America. Northern pike can weigh 25 pounds and have teeth and body shape like a gar, but have scales like a bass. They have been known to eat waterfowl. Muskellenge are the bigger cousins of the Northern Pike.

Chain pickerel are fairly uncommon, but Lake Bistineau had a good population of them. If you want to catch one, use a yellow or orange (or better yet, a yellow/orange) lure. They go for yellow and orange like a bull goes for red.

In all my years of fishing in northern Louisiana, I may have caught four or five chain pickerel, but they were worth it.

They are a game fish, they cook up nice. The most common name for them that I heard in Louisiana is “jack fish.”

Jack Fish! Now, that’s more familiar. Honestly, I never fished on Bistineau.

The picture of the chain pickerel just looks like a regular “gar.” Not an alligator gar like the ones we would bust the snouts off of…

It’s a gar. You make “gar balls” with them. If I told my stories of gar disposal, I would certainly come off as a “racist.”

Thanks for clearing that up. I was imagining a chain pickerel to be something like a Buffalo Fish, or a GasperGoo that was ALWAYS thrown back into Caddo. It was a rule…too much trouble, and not worth eating.

Chain pickerel and gar are two completely different fish. They have a superficial similarity of appearance, but they are completely different fish. I’m not an expert on fish species in Louisiana lakes, but I did a lot of fishing and I know the common and uncommon fish pretty well. Most large lakes and rivers in Louisiana have two kinds of gar, the “alligator gar” and the “needlenose gar”. The chain pickerel looks more like an alligator gar, but it’s tiny in comparison, and has smooth scales compared to the alligator gar’s overlapping bony scales. A typical alligator gar might be 15 pounds or so, and they can get huge. The all-tackle record for chain pickerel is around 9 pounds, and the Louisiana record back when I checked into such things was about 4 or 5 pounds.

Chain pickerel are beautiful fish, they have a mottled green and yellowish pattern that looks pretty much like chain link, thus the name. They like to lurk in the shallow waters among the cypress trees and in fact they are found in the same sorts of waters that largemouth bass prefer. They are ambush predators, meaning the hide in the shadows or behind weeds and dart out to eat small fish or sometimes leap out of the water to get a dragonfly. Alligator gar prefer the open waters where they lie on top of the water and warm in the sun. They are an ugly, prehistoric looking fish.

Needle-nose gar look nothing like chain pickerel.

It pains me to see such a beautiful and worthy fish like a chain pickerel dismissed as being a gar. To me that’s like calling a largemouth bass a “croaker,” which is a common trash fish found in large numbers in the large Louisiana lakes.

Give the chain pickerel some respect man, it’s a beautiful and worthy fish.